The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to controlling a backlight module, and more particularly, to a local dimming control apparatus and method of an edge-type backlight module.
In a conventional liquid crystal display (LCD) apparatus, a light source of a direct-type backlight module is commonly implemented by fluorescent tube(s). Due to the advance of the LCD technology, a partially-driven direct-type backlight module is developed, where a number of point light sources, such as light emitting diodes (LEDs), are used in a plurality of backlight units disposed below a plurality of regions of a display panel and implemented for illuminating the regions, respectively and independently. Therefore, the light intensity of the backlight module is partially changed rather than globally changed, which can improve the display quality of the video image.
However, due to consideration of low cost and small size, an edge-type backlight module is preferred. The conventional edge-type backlight module has a number of point light sources, such as LEDs arranged at a side of the LCD panels. As the local dimming control of the backlight module would affect the final display quality of the video image, how to properly control the edge-type backlight module becomes an important topic to designers in this field.